How to Customize WordPress Excerpts (No Coding Required)

Do you want to customize your WordPress excerpt? Not sure what is a WordPress excerpt? Don’t worry. In this article, we will show you how to customize WordPress excerpts (no coding required).

Excerpts are the short extract from your post. WordPress comes with a built-in function which make it easier for you to decide what you want to show as the excerpt for your post.

When and Why You Should Use Excerpts

First let’s talk about why you should use excerpts on your WordPress blog instead of full articles.

By default, WordPress shows full posts on the homepage, blog page, and archives of your site. This makes your site slower and could lead search engines to believe that all these pages have duplicate content.

Using excerpts will load your pages faster because you will only be loading a small part of each article, and your archive pages won’t get hit with a duplicate content penalty.

Some WordPress themes are configured to automatically create a short excerpt of your posts even if you didn’t add one. The disadvantage of this method is that your theme calculates the excerpt for you, and it may not look good.

That’s why you may want to create a custom excerpt. Let’s take a look at 3 different ways you can add custom excerpts in WordPress.

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1. How to Add a Custom Excerpt in WordPress (Default)

Adding a custom excerpt in WordPress is quite simple. Create a new post or edit an existing one.

On the post edit screen, click on the screen options tab on the top right and then select excerpt.

This will display an excerpt meta box below your post editor. You can now add any text in this box, and it will be used as the excerpt for the post.

The problem you will now face is that some themes will not show your custom excerpt. For those, you will have to edit your theme files particularly home.php, content.php, archive.php, category.php, etc. You will need to locate:

<?php the_content(); ?>

Next, you will need to replace it with the_excerpt tag like this:

<?php the_excerpt(); ?>

This is not an ideal solution for beginners who do not want to edit their theme files. That’s when the next method comes in handy.

2. Adding an Excerpt with The More Tag

Another way to add excerpt to your WordPress homepage and archive pages is by using the more tag.

You can add the more tag by placing your cursor in the post editor to the point where you want to break the post and then click on the more button.

I am making a blog with wordpress free and with sapor I am stuck because I don’t know how to change a photo they already had on the blog I pressed a button on the top right corner and I chose a image and it came on top of the photo that had on I’m trying to change their one not add another so could you tell me how to do it (I’m doing it with sapor)

Can you guide me on how to allow link (tag) on my post excerpt on Recent Post Extended plugin please? I tried few things – adding the tag on excerpt box, tried few things that I found online the last 3 hours, but no successful result. Please help.

WordPress is a powerful CMS platform that can handle large chunks of data through easy to use interface. Over a website it is important to showcase the offerings on the landing page to attract more visitors. WordPress provides excerpts that helps a developer to add a summary block to the webpage. This size, shape and color of the block can be customized by the user. The links to the entire content can be placed in the block and can be managed manually from the dashboard. Use only the authenticated plugins like Advanced Excerpt that doesn’t compromise the website security.

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WPBeginner is a free WordPress resource site for Beginners. WPBeginner was founded in July 2009 by Syed Balkhi. The main goal of this site is to provide quality tips, tricks, hacks, and other WordPress resources that allows WordPress beginners to improve their site(s).